From: Bill Tait
>This is simply not reasonable. One might wish that Mayberry had not
>picked up the habit of strong rhetoric that is all too common on the
>list---e.g. `absolute nonesense' means false, but is more offensive. But
>he is rejecting a claim that there is _no_ absolute truth in math and
>surely his argument is right. The axioms of group theory are true of all
>groups, the axioms of real closed fields are true of the ordered field of
>real numbers, etc. Any such example suffices for Mayberry's point.
Unfortunately *every* example passes this test. Your position if I
understand it is that axioms are true in those worlds that satisfy
those axioms. With that notion of truth every sentence S would be an
absolute truth, because S would be true in every model of S.
Vaughan Pratt
(I agree it would be nice if people toned down the polemics a bit.)